Spawncamping Is Inevitable

Logically, yes. Unless it was made impossible to reach the spawn and instead disable the ability to spawn was more profitable than farming the spawn.
We have a conflict of interests here. Spawn camping performs two roles; Padding KDR and Farming Certs (player benefit only) and providing logistical consequence to the enemy by inhibiting their ability to provide reinforcements (benificial to the team as only). Obviously, there is an incentive issue AND there is a game design flaw with how spawning works. Lets continue.

Unfortunately, without altering the fundamental design of PS2, you're logical assessment will always hold true. Which, yes, I know is your point. So you're right. lets continue.

Part of inevitable design; with the exception of Drop Pods (insertion method of deployment unimeded by any kind of choke)

Ok here we go; your final point.
What you've described so far we can deduce that -
- there are too few exits
- there are too few spawn points to provide alternate angles of reinforcement
- there for base design is terrible as designers seemed to have forgotten that chokes go both ways (herp derp)
- there is a design flaw with spawning when the only way to stop reinforcements is by killing the reinforcing players
- there is an incentive flaw with spawning where you're more rewarded for the killing while waiting for a point to cap, than just capturing a point outright with team work and tactical might
- there is a flaw in objective based play where capping a point takes so long that spawn camping is the only and easiet way to ensure victory. It's literally the only option. There is nothing else to do. Nothing. At all. Except hide behind cover and pick your *** IRL.

Still with you.
I'd debate the ultimate objective as PS2 technically does not have an end game nor a macro scale goal; but I'll with hold that for now.

As described already above. This is so true on many levels.

Yup.
The tactical incentive is to hold the choke point at the spawn room because that is the only consistent point that the enemy will come from. Even if you're not fighting for the objective XP, you as a Cert Farmer will still hunt all the way back to the Spawn Room; as it is the Source of your progression. It spawns the players which feed your KDR, XP and Certs.

You're right.

Again we are still dealing with a conflict of interests though. I play entirely objectivelly. I want what's best for the team as I play only for the team (thats the reason I got PS2 in the first place). However even still, I will always press the spawn when possible because it is the easiest to halt enemy aggression.

Spawn Rooms in this game are a terrible design and creation.

It's fine to have spawn rooms at each base. We need to have ways for players to drop in at any base when they log on and act as if they were part of it's garrison.
However, having the Spawn out in the open, easily tactically dominated by Air, Infantry and Armor and having NOOOO synergistic sub-objective like.. removing spawn tubes back in PS1? Is detrimental to say the least.

However, I'd like to note that reducing XP from spawn killing isn't exactly a bad thing.

In the end, you should be rewarded more for completing the objective than farming killing for over 3 minutes waiting for a point to cap and it's as a simple as that. Adding synergistic objectives that turn off spawning, or killing incomming ANTs to prevent resources from supplying the base or shutting off generators to stop spawning ALL should provide more than enough incentive that they are the equivalent of Farming a Spawn for 3 minutes while the point in being secured.

And of course, this means over hauling the game.

That happens, especially when you make a mistake. Unless of course SOE's objective is to let PS2 just die and take the money and run. Who knows.

However the resource revamp has yet to complete; so I'm still holding out on how far they try to emulate PS1 again as it nears full implementation. I would personally love to see bases charge you a few nanites just to respawn. Then, by having nanite storage some where, an added objective of blowing it up is an option - intercepting transports with more nanites is an option - making every base have a generator that stops spawning for a few moments is an option...

on and on...

plenty of options.

Plenty of opportunities to provide incentives.

Plenty of way to get rid of at least SOME of the camping.

Just note that no matter how you design the game deter camping? So long as there is a spawn point on any base that ignores the physical logistics of transporting a soldier to that location, camping will occur - as you've deduced.
So unless we're playing ArmA? Yup. Camping is going to happen no matter what.

Good post, sir.

Not only that, Biolabs are one of the few bases where both the attacker and defender get camped.

The only other base that I can think of where that happens is Subterranean Nanite Analysis, which again is mostly camping with infantry and few vehicles can participate in the fight.

This has nothing to do with paper thinking scissors are overpowered. It's about rock, paper, and scissors all being subject to a 4th player called NUCLEAR BOMB. And the controls are NOT like every jet fighter ever. In normal flight games rolling also turns the aircraft laterally. In normal games with flight you can bind yaw to your mouse.

And it's not "specific to me as a player." As I said, go to VR Training some time and watch people crash and crash and crash. It's because the flight mechanics and controls are unbelievably counter intuitive and the most important keybind that could help with it is not allowed, and you can find endless threads here begging SOE to enable that. It is far from "specific to me."

Sure, in casual flight games it sometimes controls yaw. In this game it doesn't, just as in real jets. That constraint makes flight more interesting as a result, and everyone is constrained in the same exact way and it's fine.

And sure, the rock/paper/scissors analogy is a bit off:

• Indoors
  • Infantry classes are rock, paper, etc.
  • MAXes are nukes which beat everything and should get balanced so that an interesting class mix can exist.
• Outdoors
  • Infantry are sheep, which beat nothing.
  • Tanks are rocks.
  • A2G aircraft are paper.
  • Skyguards are scissors.

Obviously things still get more complicated than that (and you even have weird one-offs like A2A ESFs being Paper-Cutters which only kill paper but don't lose to anything else), but the main points are that infantry are bad outside and that's fine because an interesting mix of vehicles are viable, but that infantry are also bad inside and that's NOT fine because only MAXes are good inside and that doesn't give infantry anywhere where they're good (apart from needing them to cap the point and support MAXes.)

Again: It's not that it does not, by default, control yaw. It's that the mouse CANNOT be mapped to control it, which makes it fundamentally different than typical flight games, and absolutely different than the aiming mechanic of most shooter games. Not letting Yaw be mapped to mouse is a HUGE flaw with the flight system.

And what you call "more interesting" most people call "a ridiculous and unnecessary pain in the butt that makes flight no fun at all."

And the spawn camping problem remains.

Nah, that goes back to my original point that players' bad decisions create spawn camping. Without those bad decisions, spawn camping literally cannot exist because nobody would spawn into a camped situation (you could argue they spawned there and then died once or redeployed immediately, so to the degree we can call one death a "camp" that's how much spawncamping could happen.)

Spawncamping alone isn't the issue, it's vehicles spawn camping that causes an imbalance... But, I do believe the DEVs did this on purpose so that stalemates won't occur...

It doesn't have to alter the player behavior! If you have an X amount of players and you split them randomly (doesn't really matter how) into smaller groups then the amount of groups will obviously dictate how large the group sizes are going to be in average. The smaller the number of groups is the larger the group size will be. The larger they are, the more even in size they are going to be. It doesn't really matter what the players themselves do unless ofcourse you go into theoretical extremes.

Well, if you control only 4-5 bases then no, I don't think the empires will rather move in a large circle zerging one base after the other than actually trying to hold them. Also, those bases will have atleast 2 lanes going towards the enemy bases. If you zerg only one of them and ignore the other then the zerg could be forced to fall back simply by attacking the undefended base through the other lane, because the zerg relies on that base for vehicle spawns. You see it's pretty difficult to zerg without Sunderers.

You don't seem to grasp the idea that the distance is not the key element here. It itself doesn't provide any better gameplay. Surely it provides better platform for vehicle combat, but it doesn't solve the uneven gameplay. How could it even do that? You can expand the current map sizes ten fold so that all distances are 10 times longer and we would still have as pathetic camping infested gameplay as we current have. Well, that's no entirely true. The longer distances would ofcourse make camping occur less often due to the traveling time, but the overall exprience would still be boring.

However, the thing which is important is that when the outposts are gone then we will not have as many lattice lanes to choose from. In PS1 we had maybe 1-4 lanes to advance and the lanes moved directly from one base to an other. In PS2 we have alteast the double amount of lanes to advance due to the sheer number of outposts. The lanes still go between major bases, but not directly anymore. There are typically two outposts along the way before the lane reaches the next major base. On top of that there are usually two sets of outposts forming an other "chained lattice lane" to the same base.

Amerish typically has only 1-2 outposts along the lane, but Hossin has 2-3. So even though Amerish has fewer outposts and therefore longer distances between the bases the benefit is practically nonexisting. They still share about the same number of chained lattice lanes. So empires will have to split into as many groups. That is the problem.

This is too hilarious.

The gameplay is 90% based on numbers. Practically all camping situations are a direct result of that. Especially when the numbers are large. Skill? Come on..

Also, what do you mean by losing? It has been pointed out numerous times that camping is a two way street. It's not particularly exciting to the camper either, so what exactly are they losing? How have they failed in "decision-making"? Don't tell me they should have left the outpost sooner, because how smart is it to leave it and then lose it to reinforcements?

Your juvenile black and white thinking is too amusing. I'm sure there is a third option which will favor skill and which would not render the gameplay into this camping galore.

Pretty similar to your earlier "Play better" -solution. Equally useless, unrealistic idea. Why even bother..

Almost always there is a 33/33/33% continent. On those continents, any population imbalance you experience is the result of player decisions. Which means it's the result of skill.

Well we can't say for sure they made bad decisions. The base being taken may be worth over-zerging to ensure it falls (like the tech plant on Esamir.)

But certainly the attackers aren't forced into a 75%-pop spawncamp so yes any discomfort they experience in not having enough enemies to shoot is entirely the result of their own decision. How could you say it isn't?

If someone is inaccurate with an LMG "play better" is useless because aiming better is a complicated thing that largely can only be improved by practice.

If someone is spawning repeatedly into a spawncamp, "don't spawn there" is immediately actionable by players of any skill level.

So not all "play better" advice is created equal. Some of it is genuinely useless to say, but when it comes to "don't click that respawn location, it will consistently yield bad results" that's something even the worst player can learn from.

Spawn camping just happens when you are outnumbered.

Players naturally keep leap frogging past each other in order to get kills. If 10 guys are in one door way you move to the next closest to be able to shoot people. This keeps happening until you are right outside the spawn.